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Friday, September 05, 2008

Christian Post... Disappointing

It's becoming obvious that Christian Post does not "partakes in delivering only the veracity of the words of Jesus Christ" which it affirms in its mission statement.

I've read 3 of its posts on Rowan Williams and the current condition of the Anglican Communion (post 1, 2, and 3). And I find that these reports are theologically deficient, reality distorting, and inadequately apprehended. Hence its reporting and pronouncement of the issue is immature and far away from delivering only the veracity of the words of Jesus Christ.

Its recent post entitled 'Anglican Conservatives Split to Preserve Biblical Orthodoxy' is an example of grotesque reporting. When I read those posts, I can't help but to see the resemblances between The Christian Post and Malaysia's government-owned The Star newspaper. Both betray the register of journalism. Even the title of the article is scheming.

The post starts with,

The Biblically-faithful section of the Anglican Communion has for all practical purposes departed from the spiritual community and formed their own, a deliberation Global Anglican Future Conference (GAFCON) primates...(Italics mine)

This is an explicit denouncement that those who do not agree with GAFCON are Biblically-unfaithful. And this is utterly absurd!

Then the article went on,

Archbishop John Chew has been prodded by conservatives in Singapore to make clear his stand on the issue to avoid public misperception and take action regarding the Archbishop of Canterbury’s open betrayal of Scripture and Communion. (Italics mine)

In the lecture, Williams maneuvers the difficulty of understanding passages such as Romans 1 and 2 with clear recognition of the matrix and subversive nature of the Biblical author's argument,

...there is a paradox in reading Romans 1 as a foundation for identifying in others a level of sin that is not found in the chosen community.

Now this gives little comfort to either party in the current culture wars in the Church. It is not helpful for a 'liberal' or revisionist case, since the whole point of Paul's rhetorical gambit is that everyone in his imagined readership agrees in thinking the same-sex relations of the culture around them to be as obviously immoral as idol-worship or disobedience to parents. It is not very helpful to the conservative either, though, because Paul insists on shifting the focus away from the objects of moral disapprobation in chapter 1 to the reading /hearing subject who has been up to this point happily identifying with Paul's castigation of someone else.

I'm not against politically motivated media. I'm just disappointed over the hypocrisy of media that sways beyond its mission but still masquerade itself as if it has not. And so far, on this issue, the Christian Post has not fail to promote itself to be exactly that.

Not sure whether if this has anything to do with that one abstruse word found in the first clause of their Statement of Faith.